Over the Wall: A Drone View of the ‘Other’ Side

Abstract

This study intervenes in the presumed remoteness of the visual condition and experience of the aerial image created by the drone apparatus, to create new knowledge about the cultural and societal spaces that these envisioning technologies reveal. Using The Walls that Surround Us, a short drone-film of the Peace Walls in Belfast by local film-maker James Brennan, this study captures the participant’s lived experience of the place that is the film’s subject, and analyses how the system of visual signification captured within the film, operates to intervene, sustain, or subvert his association with this place. This ethnographic framing of the other side of the wall using the drone apparatus, reveals how the human is interconnected with the wider material world, its histories, and events and thus, like the over general labels used to define the different communities in Belfast (Catholic and Protestant), cannot be reduced to dialectical opposition: as a technologically mediated condition there is at once difference and the same.